Expert Python Programming - Third Edition

The confusing state of Python packaging tools

The state of Python packaging was very confusing for a long time and it took many years to bring organization to this topic. Everything started with the distutils package introduced in 1998, which was later enhanced by setuptools in 2003. These two projects started a long and knotted story of forks, alternative projects, and complete rewrites that tried to (once and for all) fix the Python packaging ecosystem. Unfortunately, most of these attempts never succeeded. The effect was quite the opposite. Each new project that aimed to supersede setuptools or distutils only added to the already huge confusion around packaging tools. Some of such forks were merged back to their ancestors (such as distribute ...